In the interconnected worlds of sci-fi, fantasy and horror, composer Bear McCreary is everywhere. He and his studio have produced the original soundtracks to blockbusters like Godzilla: King of the Monsters, the popular God of War video game series, a slew of Blumhouse horror flicks, and a shocking number of concurrent genre television series, from Outlander to The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. And last year he branched out with a metal-leaning concept album, The Singularity, featuring contributions from System of a Down’s Serj Tankian, Slash and Rufus Wainwright, among others.
Film soundtracks aren’t always supposed to stand out. In today’s Hollywood, an original score is there to compliment sound design, to create an atmosphere rather than send the audience home with a tune stuck in their heads. McCreary’s music is there to be noticed. His themes are bold and memorable, mashing together sounds and sensibilities from traditional orchestra, world music, and epic metal. This intensity has made him the rare soundtrack composer who has a large and vocal fanbase who will reliably tune in to his releases even when they have no interest in the media for which they were composed, and he’s recently embarked on a 20-city concert tour across Europe, North America, and Australia.
Like so many success stories, McCreary’s career was sparked by a collision between hard work and blind luck. He set his sights on becoming a film composer as a middle schooler in Bellingham, Washington in the early 1990s, worshipping the likes of John Williams and James Horner. Still just a kid, he spent nights and weekends hammering away at a feature-length score to a film that he’d written (but not actually produced) with a school friend. In 1996, as a high school junior, he accepted a Student of the Month award at his local Rotary Club, where he happened to meet an acquaintance of legendary film composer Elmer Bernstein. Bernstein became his mentor, writing his recommendation letter to USC’s Film Scoring program and allowing him to audit his Senior-level classes for three years.
Bernstein’s mentorship was invaluable, but it also served as a rude awakening as McCreary got a front-row seat to a transformation in the way film scores were composed.
“I say this with all love and respect and pride,” McCreary tells Observer, “but Elmer Bernstein was fired more times in the ‘90s than any major composer.”
In Bernstein’s heyday of the 1950s and ‘60s, during which he composed the earworm themes to The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape, it was common for a composer to write a score by hand without feedback from the filmmakers, who typically wouldn’t hear any of it until it was recorded on the scoring stage. Today, technology allows composers to be more flexible and to produce a higher volume of work, responding to continuous input from filmmakers and typically employing a team of assistants and apprentices to execute the agreed upon vision. With more hands onboard, a composer can accommodate more frequent revisions to a score with less notice.
Detractors of modern film scoring see this as an industrialized workflow that’s damaged the quality of film music in the 21st century, but McCreary compares this criticism to similar complaints about the VFX industry. If a filmmaker or a producer knows they have the ability to change their mind about a sequence, a visual effect, or a music cue at the eleventh hour, they’re going to do it, even if it means the composer has to scramble the troops.
“No single human being can rewrite an entire score overnight,” says McCreary. “This is where having a team is useful. It’s not that the composer is like ‘I have other things to do,’ it’s that there’s things that just cannot be done.” McCreary credits his ability to personally compose the score to every note on The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power to its producers settling on a vision early and then sticking with it, providing him with the maximum time to work on each episode.
Rather than downplay his reliance on his team at Sparks & Shadows, McCreary says he’s been driven to make their contributions more visible. On the latest seasons of Foundation, The Serpent Queen, and Halo, as well as the Valhalla DLC for God of War: Ragnarok, the music is not credited to Bear McCreary, but to Sparks & Shadows. When the score to Percy Jackson & the Olympians won a Children & Family Emmy last year, it wasn’t McCreary, but 27-year-old Brian Claeys who gave the acceptance speech alongside five of his Sparks & Shadows teammates.
McCreary feels that this may be the only way for new composers to gain a foothold during this period of industry contraction.
“Everyone is afraid,” says McCreary. “When you’re afraid, you don’t take risks. When you’re afraid, you hire names you know. No one is gonna get mad at you for hiring Michael Giacchino. But that means that, for young people, it’s harder to break in today than ever before. So, when producers come to me or my peers who are ‘safe,’ our names put you at ease because we’ve done so much. We can say ‘Hey, check out my crew at Sparks & Shadows. This is my guy Brian Claeys, who was my lead writer on Percy Jackson, he’s a huge asset to the show.’”
McCreary owes his own success to such a recommendation. After graduating from USC, he got a job assisting relatively unknown Hollywood composer Richard Gibbs, who’d booked the job writing the score to a 2003 pilot miniseries rebooting Battlestar Galactica. When Galactica got picked up as a series, Gibbs was unable to fit it into his schedule, so he offered the gig to his assistant.
Battlestar Galactica went on to become a cult hit, and its young composer quickly attracted the attention of its passionate audience. Honoring the creative direction of showrunners Ronald D. Moore and David Eick, Battlestar sounded nothing like any space sci-fi show Hollywood had ever produced, incorporating an eclectic mix of instruments from the duduk to the hurdy-gurdy to an army of taiko drums under electric guitar and string orchestra. Beginning with the release of the Battlestar Galactica Season 2 soundtrack album, McCreary led live concerts of the show’s music for increasingly larger audiences. Meanwhile, the composer kept his fans engaged via regular blog posts, essentially annotating his entire body of work as it was released and interacting with his enthusiastic comments section.
Though he doesn’t see this as a marketing tactic, in hindsight McCreary was an early adopter of the now-obligatory model of curating a close relationship with one’s fans.
“If you were the kind of person who watched BSG on the Sci-Fi Channel and noticed the music and cared enough about it to find out who scored it, go to their website, go to the blog, read the blog, and ask me a question, then you’re my kind of person.
“As the series went on, those interactions became really valuable. Sometimes they’d ask me questions that would make me think about the way I’m writing the show. The show was produced so quickly. By the time we got to Season Four, an episode would air, and someone would make a comment about a character theme, or maybe ask a question about what a theme is doing, and I would think ‘Well hey, there’s a good idea in there! I should do that! I’m only two episodes ahead, I’m gonna do that and see if they notice.’”
This sort of interactivity between artist and audience has since become the engine that drives the entertainment industry in the 21st century. McCreary leaned fully into “process as product,” and he continues to publish detailed breakdowns of his scores as they hit screens. Consequently, the number of young composers who could name him as a teacher or mentor goes far beyond his pupils at Sparks & Shadows.
With or without a team behind them, every artist has limits. In 2019, at what should have been the pinnacle of his career, Bear McCreary was nearing a breaking point.
He found himself getting everything he’d wanted—two of his four film scores that year were in the top ten at the box office simultaneously—but it was all making him less happy, not more. “It was starting to gnaw at me,” he says. “ My mental health was cratering.”
Relief came not in the form of less work, but rather different work. For the closing credits of 2019’s Godzilla: King of Monsters, McCreary recorded a thunderous cover of Blue Oyster Cult’s 1977 single “Godzilla” with his orchestra, System of a Down vocalist Serj Tankian, and friends from the parody metal band Dethklok. The process brought back the exhilaration he’d experienced as a teenager playing keyboards in rock and metal bands, something he gave up in order to be taken seriously as a film composer.
“I had this odd feeling when I recorded it,” says McCreary. “I had so much fun, but I was also sad because it took me 15 years of my career to get these guys together and record a metal song that I loved. And I thought, ‘God, is it gonna take another 15 years?’ It occurred to me that maybe that’s what was missing. What if I don’t wait for a movie for an excuse to do the thing I want to do?”
McCreary began work on an original suite of music that utilized his entire sonic palette, from epic metal to traditional classical to Celtic folk. While most of his work is guided by parameters set by other storytellers, this time there would be only one: It had to be fun to play live.
The production of the resulting concept album, The Singularity, helped McCreary revive the sort of creative spirit that drove his younger self to hang up fliers around campuses, looking for collaborators and offering to score student films. Only now, the people answering the call were Serj Tankian, Rufus Wainright, Mega Ran, Joe Satriani and Slash.
After a single concert of The Singularity at the Fonda Theater in Los Angeles last year, McCreary found he could not shake the bug to perform. Instead, he began planning the Themes & Variations Tour, on which he and an orchestra of traditional and eclectic instruments will perform music from across his discography. For the first time, fans on three continents who could only read on Bear’s Blog about the occasional Los Angeles Battlestar Galactica concert will get to participate in McCreary’s music, live and in person.
“At the core of it, I’m just a fan of all these things that I’m working on,” says McCreary. “I want to be able to just be in a room with people who love all the stuff that I love, and I’m not gonna be Ziggy Stardust, here. I’m just me, playing the music I love. I’m playing some Battlestar pieces that go back that far. You’re gonna know what I went through writing it.”
The Themes & Variations Tour comes to New York’s Gramercy Theatre on May 22nd.
